Many products when being transported in shipping containers must be firmly retained in such containers often under severe handling conditions, i.e., when the containers are subject to vibration, dropping, or other relatively violent movements thereof, so as to prevent damage to the product. Current packaging techniques for such purposes conventionally utilize solid plastic foam blocks, e.g., of polystyrene or other thermosetting plastic materials, which are specifically shaped to conform to an overall product or at least to selected portions of the product and act as substantially inflexible retainers which relatively completely, or at least partially, surround the product within a shipping container. In some cases, gaps between the product and the container are often loosely filled with separately formed polystyrene plastic pellets, sometimes referred to in the packaging field as plastic "peanuts" or "void fill", or the product may be completely immersed in such pellets within a container.
Such techniques are relatively expensive in that the components used therein are generally discarded once shipment has been made and the product has been removed from the container since such components are not readily reusable and generally cannot be readily recycled. Accordingly, they are often merely placed in landfills where they can be environmentally harmful since they do not degrade as would be desired. Moreover, when relatively large solid plastic foam blocks are used, they are bulky and require relatively large containers for shipment of the products. Furthermore, such large containers take up excessive amounts of storage space.
While it has been suggested that simple rectangular plastic bags, i.e., polyethylene plastic bags inflated with air and permanently sealed, be merely placed at various positions adjacent a product in its container so as to provide a cushion therefor, such inflated polyethylene bags are not effective in retaining the product in a reasonably fixed position in the container and also tend to lose the air therein relatively rapidly so as to become unusable, either during or after transit, and are not readily recyclable. Moreover, such materials are not static dissipative materials, a characteristic which is often desirable in packaging many products, such as electronic products, for example. Further, such inflated bags are relatively easily punctured and often cannot withstand the rough handling which may occur during shipment.
It is desirable to provide a packaging technique which uses packaging components which can effectively retain products in a reasonably tightly fixed position in their shipping containers or cartons, which components can be reused many times before their usefulness ends, and which need not be discarded but rather can be easily recycled for refabrication of such components.
More recent innovative packaging techniques and components have been discussed in my U.S. Pat. No. 5,351,289 issued to me on Oct. 4, 1994, and in my U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/227,798, filed by me on Apr. 14, 1994. While the disclosures therein describe unique and desirable packaging components that have many applications in the packaging field, in some applications it is desirable to devise other uniquely different configurations so as to provide less expensive components which are easier to fabricate and which are useful in other applications, particularly where it is desirable to reduce the size of the containers in which the packaging components are used so as to reduce the amount of storage space required therefor.